The battle for the future of the Open Web is taking place as a new document model merges into a platform for highly graphical, interactive and information rich applications. Open source communities vie with dominant vendors Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Nokia and Google to stake out their claims as open source innovations collide with standards consortia and proprietary alternatives.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Email encryption in transit

Many email providers don’t encrypt messages while they’re in transit. When you send or
receive emails with one of these providers, these messages are as open to snoopers as a
postcard in the mail.

A growing number of email providers are working to change that, by encrypting messages
sent to and from our services using Transport Layer Security (TLS). When an email is
encrypted in transit with TLS, it makes it harder for others to read what you’re sending.
The data below explains the current state of email encryption in transit.

Generally speaking, use of encryption in transit increases over time, as more providers
enable and maintain their support. Factors such as varying volumes of email may explain
other fluctuations.

Below is the percentage of email encrypted for the top domains in terms of volume of email to
and from Gmail, in alphabetical order.

Explore the data

Search any domain (e.g. “example.com”) or string (e.g. “de”) to see how much of the email
exchanged with Gmail is encrypted in transit. Or download the full dataset.